This is in reference to the audio book.

I give this a three star because I have pretty bad expectations for novella spin-offs; without the main characters, the story usually falls flat.

So this book did surprisingly well at maintaining the usual cop-slash-wizard procedural story. I expected a lot of the re-hashing, and there was definitely a lot of that.

The real problems are as follows:

1. How much German am I supposed to know?
- I understand all the German is supposed to build atmosphere and certainly the German accent added to that too, but it made a lot of things incomprehensible to me. Most of the names of places and departments flew by me. I ended up buying the Kindle book to follow along - I realised I’d lost track of the suspects 2/3 of the way through the book.

2. Sibilant much?
- I thought publishing houses put more effort into audiobooks these days, so it was with great surprise to find that nothing was done to tone down the sibilants in the audio. All the over-powering “s” physically hurt me - I had to crank down the treble in my car to get through most of the book.

So overall, if you are really desperate for a story set in the Peter Grant word (fully understanding that there is no actual Peter Grant or a very diluted version of him), then pick up this book. And even then, pick up the Kindle version; you’d save your ears, and the story would make more sense (if, like me, you don’t know German).